Under The Counter has never really gotten over the widespread adoption of the metric system.
It’s for this reason he loves journalists using alternative units of measurement like ‘Olympic-sized swimming pools’ and ‘double-decker buses’ in their stories, rather than the more conventional litre and metre.
So he was over the moon, which is 31,666,666 double-decker buses away from Earth, to discover that toilet paper manufacturer, the delightfully named Who Gives A Crap, is flushed with pride after delivering more than nine million loo rolls across London.
Why did this please the Auld Boy? Because that’s enough bum wipes – so the environmentally friendly brand says – to wrap around the earth (at the equator, one presumes) a whopping 10 times.
This, of course, is nonsense of the highest order, since – as a pedantic UTC was at great pains to point out – toilet roll breaks down in water, be that in a lavvy pan or the planet’s vast oceans.
For the record, an Olympic-sized swimming pool holds 2.5 million litres of water (or 660,000 gallons if you’re the Auld Boy) and an unspecified amount of urine. UTC said he had no idea how many toilet rolls it would take to soak all that liquid up, but looked decidedly shifty when asked who peed in the pool.
